Quotes from famous people is not my favorite type of Facebook post. Often they are platitudinous, repetitive (the most platitudinous tend to be the most often repeated, the lowest common denominator draws the biggest crowd) and I’ve seen a few people on Facebook who post nothing but that. That disturbs me – do they have no thoughts of their own? Why am I in communication with this person at all?
But, I came across a good quote about half an hour ago, just as I was in need of a blog topic, so right place at the right time and all that: We are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing. -Alan Watts
That Alan Watts was a mighty cool dude. Each of us is a microcosm of the universe. All waves of light are made up of particles. Things can be subdivided into smaller and smaller units but it’s all working together. It fits into Ken Wilber’s four quadrants philosophy nicely as well. (Yikes, I just looked that up, just to check, since I’m writing about it, and realized it’s not what I thought it was at all. Wilber divides everything into Individual/Interior, Individual/Exterior, Collective/Interior, and Collective/Exterior and while Watts’ quote doesn’t contradict that, that’s not the connection I was trying to make.
What I had thought it was was: Everything is what it is, Everything is the parts it contains, Everything is a part of something bigger, and Everything is …well, that’s why I was looking it up.
I don’t know if Wilber ever said anything like that, or if Alan Watts would have agreed that what I’m saying is at all relevant to what he said, but… everything in the universe is interconnected, that’s just sort of a bland thing to say, and obvious…the interesting part is figuring out how.